The present invention relates generally to storage systems and, more particularly, to reducing workload in a storage system.
The amount of digital data is growing rapidly. As a result, a storage subsystem is required to provide more storage capacity. To utilize storage resources, a storage subsystem provides data reduction features such as compression and de-duplication. However, these features consume more computing resources such as processor and memory of the storage subsystem. For improving data reduction workload, specialized hardware for processing such as compression and de-duplication is provided. This kind of hardware acts as gateway between server and storage.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2009/0063528 discloses a method for de-duplicating redundant data in memory, storage, or both, comprising: providing a virtualization layer on a computer architecture comprising memory for temporarily storing data, and storage for persistently storing data. Also, VMware Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., shows a method for aggregating computing capacity across a plurality of servers and dynamically allocating workload on these servers to optimize aggregated computing capacity distributed as VMware vSphere™ 4 Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) software.
With the specialized hardware approach, however, it is difficult to expand capacity according to the usage of data store, I/O, and processor/memory. Also, it is difficult to migrate from running process on the storage subsystem without disrupting existing connection between host and storage. US2009/0063528 does not show how to migrate from running process on the storage subsystem without disrupting existing connection between host and storage. VMware vSphere™ 4 DRS does not show how to allocate workloads between host and storage dynamically, especially for workload which is not virtualized storage process. VMware vSphere™ 4 DRS further fails to show how to distribute one storage workload to multiple servers after dividing the storage workload.